By Edwin Dean
Doesn’t that make you feel better? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, official arbiter of economic cycles, the recession ended in June of 2009 and a new recovery period began, no matter how tepid. http://nber.org/cycles/sept2010.html. Never mind that since that time the economy has lost more jobs than it has added and that the national unemployment rate, at 9.6%, remains near its recent high. National output of goods and services has increased.
Nonetheless, there are several favorable straws in the wind to give some grounds for a hope that employment conditions are indeed slowly improving.
- A July study by Accenture found that more than half (54 percent) of large U.S. businesses that reduced staff in the previous 12 months plan to rebuild their workforces to pre-recession levels within two years. http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id-5034
- The Monster Employment Index is actually up 12% year over year, continuing a seven month trend of growth. http://about-monster.com/sites/default/files/employment-index/MEIAug10%20Full%20Report%20-%20FINAL.pdf. The Monster Employment Index is a monthly gauge of U.S. online job demand based on a real-time review of millions of employer job opportunities culled from a large representative selection of corporate career Web sites and job boards, including Monster.com.
- Indeed.com, which aggregates jobs being advertised on job boards, newspapers and corporate employment websites, is showing 8,971 sales jobs currently being advertised in Colorado at a compensation level of $40,000 or higher. http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Sales&l=Colorado
- The most recent JOLT Report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover) of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.htm shows that there were 2,723,000 private job openings available in July of this year, up from 2,046,000 openings a year earlier.
- According to the American Staffing Association, temporary jobs have increased 21% over this period as more employers hire through staffing agencies to help control health care costs and maintain flexibility. At a current index value of 96, U.S. staffing employment is 39% higher than the level reported for the first week of the current year and is 25% higher than the same weekly period in 2009. http://www.americanstaffing.net/statistics/staffing_index.cfm
The term “cautiously optimistic” seems to fit.